Linux Desktop CPU Roundup: Cutting Edge Penguin Performance

Content Creation

On the other end of Synthetic Benchmarks, we have content creation benchmarks, which are extremely difficult to replicate and convey little information if interpreted incorrectly. Below, we compiled lame 3.96.1 without any additional optimizations and then used the following command on a 800mb .wav file.

# lame sample.wav -b 192 -m s -h - >/dev/null

The file is sent to stdout, which is then directed to /dev/null. We do not want the hard drive to throttle our MP3 encoding if possible, even if we are just immediately destroying it.

Hold your mouse over for the 64-bit graph.

Under the GCC 3.4.1 compiler, we noticed the largest difference between 64-bit and 32-bit binaries yet. The 64-binaries are encoding 25 times faster than if we were to play them, i.e. in one second the Athlon FX-53 encodes ~25 seconds worth of playtime!

Next, we used the SuSE 9.1 Pro i686 RPM for this portion of the analysis. The 700MB test file from the lame benchmark above was compressed and then timed using the command below.

# time gzip -c sample.wav > /dev/null

Hold your mouse over for the 64-bit graph.

Now on to our MEncoder test. We compiled 1.0pre5 from source without any optimizations. We had difficulty getting MPlayer to compile on x86_64, and thus, that portion was omitted. The benchmark command that we ran is below:

# time mencoder sample.mpg -nosound -ovc lavc vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2 -o sample.avi


Again, we saw vast differences between the AMD and Intel processors on these content specific benchmarks.